1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to reducing application MTBF (mean time before failure) rates in large-scale and/or widely distributed PLM (product lifecycle management) applications within an IT (information technology) infrastructure environment by the generation and extraction of data from workstations within the PLM environment that experience abnormal program termination.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current IT departments are not able to create an accurate problem description of an abnormal program termination since they traditionally only have access to abnormal program termination logs that are incapable of creating a comprehensive and detailed event history in the workstation leading up to the abnormal program termination of an application.
In a PLM environment, each designer has his own workstation with a PLM application running on it. While the PLM application is running, the application may experience an abnormal program termination, known as an “abend,” (abnormal end), from time to time. In most cases, the designer will not inform the IT department about this crash, but will reboot the workstation on his own and continues with his work. At the time of the abend, the PLM application creates a log detailing the nature of the abend. This situation may happen hundreds of times with workstations across the PLM design department or a multi-location collaborative environment. These abends, and their lack of proper reporting, cause significant deterioration of performance of individual design departments and the total PLM environment.
The IT department typically recognizes the abend logs some time after the occurrence of the abend. The IT department may create problem descriptions for these abends to supply a correction from the software supplier, via a PMR (problem record). To create a problem report, the IT department needs to know the statistically significant pattern of events surrounding abnormal program termination. Normally, statistics on these pattern of events must be created manually to determine which set of abnormal program termination events need to be prioritized for fixing.
Currently, there is no information collected immediately preceding the abnormal program termination detailing the events that occur in the operating system (OS) and the IT-infrastructure of a workstation.
Without this information, statistically significant groups of events leading to abnormal program termination cannot be accurately determined and meaningfully analyzed in conjunction with OS and IT-infrastructure events.